Oh How I Love the West

Oh how I miss the West.  West with a capital W.  Not just California where I’m from, but the whole west – the Rockies and the Sierras, the high dessert on the Eastern Sierras, Wyoming and Montana, California beaches and the Grand Canyon.   Even out to Texas and the Dakotas, with Big Bend and the Badlands. The National Parks.

I’ve spent the last twenty years in Connecticut; we came for my husband’s job and it’s been very, very good to us.  We have a home that we never could have afforded in California.  The schools have been fabulous.  We’ve found deep, wonderful friendships, and good churches.  We have vacationed:  Acadia National Park, West Virginia, The Great Smokey Mountains, Virginia Beach.  When the kids were little, we went to Vermont with the picturesque farms where you can hold lambs like babies and feed calves with bottles.  It has really been so very good.

But in Connecticut, you can never see the whole sky.  There are hills, but no mountains.  I moved to the area, and everyone kept talking about The Mountain.  The mall was on the other side of the mountain; the hospital was over the mountain, go over the mountain to get to this or that restaurant.  And I kept thinking, “What mountain??”  I didn’t see any mountains. I was looking for craggy peaks topped with snow, heavy on the granite.  When they finally pointed out the mountain, I was so disappointed; it was just (as far as I was concerned) a big hill.  Covered in green trees. Dwarfed even by California’s Coastal Range.

If fact, most of Connecticut is covered in green trees.  In mid-October we hit peak fall colors; they are glorious and I practically drive off the road looking for each and every vibrant leaf and branch. In the winter, after the fall colors have dropped, we see the twiggy sticks of trees, and I like that because it lets in so much more light.  In the early spring, I look out the window each day, waiting for the leaves to start to bud, because it looks like delicate lace, so airy and pale green and letting through so much light.  But in the summer, the leaves are heavy and thick and leathery.  It’s hot and buggy and humid.  And you can’t see for any distance.  Because of all the trees.

Everywhere I’ve gone in the East has been covered in green: green grass, green trees, green bushes and lots of green bugs (other colors too!).  It’s nice, but it’s not and never will be home. I can’t see the sky.

I yearn for the west.  I want to be able to sit on the beach at sunset (because, of course the sun sets in the West and not in the East), and see such a vast ocean and sky such that I can actually see the subtle arc of the curvature of the earth.  In the East, they call the beach the shoreline.  For the first several years I could not for the life of me figure out why.  Then I realized:  compared to California, there is no beach, only a shoreline.  Your park your car, and start walking to the ocean.  You are at the water in about two minutes, and the “sand” is rocky.  In California, or at least in Huntington Beach, you park your car, hoist all your beach paraphernalia, and begin your trek.  It’s at least a hundred yards. Six volleyball courts barely take up the first third. The beach, the sand, is soft and white and deep, wriggling between your toes.  The warmth is comforting, or the heat will burn the soles of your feet. But it is surely a trek, a long trek, to get to the water.

I want to see the endless golden grasslands or ranch-lands that go on flat forever, or roll in undulating waves. I like the play of the wind in the tall grasses, which are only green in late winter or early spring, depending on how far south you are.  Then all that grass turns golden in the summer, and brown in the autumn. But it’s still graceful and goes on forever.

The fruit and nut trees in California’s Central Valley bloom in mid-February. Mid-February!  When Connecticut is dark and grey and snowy and frozen. Those orchards go on for miles: neat rows, but billowing with blossoms and carpeted in petals of white and soft pink.  Fragrant. With the first lemons and oranges hanging heavy off the trees.

The Blossom Trail, California Central Valley

Even the wildflowers – so much more expansive in the West because there is just so much more space.  They may not be as densely packed as in the East, but when you get heavy rains in the winter and a super bloom in the spring, the colors are vibrant and stunning.  Especially because you know that just a few months ago, it was dry and brown and cracked.  We make the trek out to Antelope Valley to see the California Poppies in bloom. Admittedly, California doesn’t have the bulbs of crocus, daffodils, tulips and iris like Connecticut, and those are wonderful, I love them; but my heart is still out west.

And the sky is huge.  Just huge. When there are no clouds, it’s unbelievable how much blue is out there. Painted above us. When a storm rolls in, as in Montana and Utah and Wyoming, those heavy black thunderclouds billow and roil and are so massive they are truly threatening, because you see them stretching across the entire horizon. When the sky is full of fluffy white clouds, it’s ethereal, with sunlight pouring through. And finally, when the sun goes down, and the night is black, the stars are infinite and brilliant.  Shooting stars; planets. And if you can stop and get out in a truly isolated place, you can feel utterly cold, and alone, and at peace, overwhelmed in wonder. And again, unblocked by trees, it is all-encompassing, making you smaller and yet somehow bigger, because your eyes see so much.

I need the mountains with crags that look like cathedral spires.  They are blue and purple and grey and white. As then sun starts to set, you get the alpine-glow, and the mountains radiate pink and orange and even yellow. Once I was driving over the Grapevine north of L.A. There is a ring of mountains roughly circling the entire extended L.A. basin; as you head north towards the Central Valley, you climb up over Tejon Pass at 4144’, and then descend down to Grapevine, with a huge truck stop and grapevine fields, flat and as far as the eye can see.   The mountains stand like the ramparts to L.A. and, as it was nearing sunset, I came down onto the flat land and glanced into the side mirror to change lanes.  It was one of the most spectacular scenes I had ever beheld.  The mountains were aglow. The light was catching on the mountains and it glowed in the most brilliant red and orange I have ever seen; it was like they were on fire, but not the real, terrifying fire.  I glanced again in the mirror and wanted to just look and look and gaze at the sight, in awe.  But the traffic was fast and heavy, and I had to just drive.  But it was an unearthly sight that has never left me.  THAT’s a mountain. THAT’s what the sun and the sky can do.

I love the Sierras and the Rockies and the Tetons.  They are rough and hard and majestic.  They say when Lewis and Clark hit the Rockies, they were staggered.  In the east, if you come to a mountain, you climb up to the top and then down the other side.  In the West, you climb up the first peak, the most impossible peak you could never have imagined, and while you expect to be able to simply go down on the other side, you can’t.  It is endless and unimaginable peak after ridge after peak and ridge.  For Lewis and Clark, it was a kick in the gut that after climbing the hardest mountain they’d ever encountered, they’d barely begun.  They’d probably die doing this. I have grown up with the luxury of being able to drive up to and over these mountains, and I never get tired of them. 

Photo by The Bio Major, out in Montana

I love Yosemite.  I have a postcard from the shop there; in the picture, the top 95% of the monolith is simply sheer granite, glowing vaguely pink in the sun, and you can’t even begin to see the top of it; having been there, you know that the granite is three or four times the height shown. The next lower 4.9% is trees, which are actually enormous and neck-craningly tall; then tiny at the very bottom of the photo, such that you can barely notice them, are five deer: the bottom .1% of the picture. I am overwhelmed by the scale.  The towering rock and how small we are in comparison.  And how great is this world we live in. How huge.

My rendering of the Yosemite postcard

They say that once astronauts have been to space and look back at Earth, that they never see it the same way again.  It’s simply one beautiful world, and there are no countries and borders. To me, the west is just a little of that perspective.

All of it.  The Grand Canyon and Badlands are wonderful, and again, endless. You can see the geology and layers, the wear from the elements, the wild shapes and untamed vitality. The wind whips across your face and hair, but it’s a hot, dry wind and you don’t soak in sweat. And, as far as I’m concerned, that Badlands are just the Grand Canyon turned up-side-down and I love it. 

Badlands National Park, South Dakota. At sunset.

My dad used to talk about the really Big trees. He loved them.  Of course there are the Redwoods and Sequoias, and so many other varieties of pine and everything-else-I don’t-know-what. Trees just grow bigger out West.  And the General Sherman may be the biggest in the world by mass, but it’s not the tallest.  Those are the Redwoods, many at Jedediah State Park.  The really BIG trees.  I read a book recently about grad students studying them and trying to find the tallest one, because no one had ever really done that before.  They discovered whole ecosystems in the canopies that no one ever knew existed.  They’ve been there so long, that soil has formed in the tree tops, and berry bushes grow.  Hundreds of feet up in the air.  Birds and small animals living up there.  And we never even know it. 

This is all the west, and it’s in my bones.  Literally I just have to look at pictures of this online, and my respiration slows and my blood pressure goes down.  Oh, how I miss the West.